You might be right. I think survival is sort of instinctive and spans generations. I see the initial problems but not the long term conquests that so many believe will happen.
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You might be right. I think survival is sort of instinctive and spans generations. I see the initial problems but not the long term conquests that so many believe will happen.
Miss Winnie, The first riot will more than likely take place in a ration line. And do you really trust the governmet to be truly impartial in doleing out food? As elitist as politicians are, do you believe that they wouldn't insure that they got priority as to food stuffs?Quote:
Originally Posted by Winnie
Fat people back then, for the most part were people of power and/or money. Today we have kids that obese who are in families recieving food stamps!Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick
It will be during that transition period that most of the casualties will occur. As long as the smart, industrious survive, we will have a chance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick
I don't agree, by the time everything settles down in an urban area, any water available will be far between. This means expending calories to collect it. Plus any others in the cities will be protecting their resources, puting you at risk.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick
If you haven't guessed by now, i've done a lot of thinking and research on this. For the fiction book i'm writing, which takes place in an urban enviroment.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is what will you do when the area you are hunting and foraging in becomes over hunted/foraged? Even Native Americans had to move periodically because game and other food resources became scarce.
Most people think about deer, rabbits,squirrels, etc. but overlook furbearers. Raccoon, opossums, beavers, etc. are generally as abundant if not more abundant than common species of wild game. A knowledge of furbearers and trapping would be very helpful, if not essential, in a survival or SHTF situation.
Categorically no on both counts Sarky, hence my preps. However, Gryff raised a very valid point when he mentioned getting in line for rations. If you're not there, but seem to be doing well and all your neighbours are in the queue, they will eventually start to wonder and as Gryff stated, come to the conclusion you may have your own stores.Quote:
Originally Posted by SARKY
My position is slightly different because of my location, but I'm certainly not going to turn down any food items offered.
Swamprat, around here the deer will go quickly, but the other critters will take much longer to be eaten. That's why I will be defending the areas I hunt with extreme prejudice. And I won't even have to be there to defend it. The woods will not be a safe place for people if it ever comes to this.
It appears some underestimate the mentallity of people today and also underestimate the effectivenes of gang warfare or whatever you want to call it.
Hopefully those of you that think the world ain't goong to hell have brought your neighbors together to enact a plan of defense. If not you will be the first to go. It doesn't matter how many guns you have or bars on the windows. You can't compete against a large group however disorganized or inept they may or may not be.
I would probably wait and see the situation out. Also, who would move with me would depend on the time of year. Most would opt out during the summer. It is hot, humid and the bugs will cause many to bug out.
If it ever did get bad enough, I would make my way to a camp I know where other like minded people will go. If there isn't a co-operative community there I will move deeper into the back country.
I also think that learning ways to cook food that most people will not know is edible or will turn up their nose to is smart. Gar is great example of fish that is in over abundance in this area and that most anglers will not touch. However, folks that have eaten gar all swear it is great fish to eat.
Miss Winnie, You are most correct in getting in the food line. Don't ever give up any pretense of bring helpless if it allows you to fly under the radar.
The gangs have a leg up when it come to organization of a group as well as a hierarchy. If you put a group together, get it right the first time as the gangs will look at you as a rival and take you down if they can.
large groups can be whittled down to size by various means (unconvential warfare)Quote:
Originally Posted by rwc1969
For those of you that are bugging in types, how do you intend to cook your meals, etc. for 2 years if there is no energy provided to you by the powers that be?
Say you live in a high rise apartment complex for instance.
Do you have 2 years worth of propane stored? will it be safe? What will you do with all the feces that is generated by eating since you may not have working plumbing?
For me RWC, I have an open fire and a woodburning range indoors. One of the benefits of living in an old cottage. The other advantage is the room would be heated too. I also am now the proud owner of a Kelly Kettle. I also have a gas stove, but that is more for emergencies than long term.
I'd do the outhouse thing with regard to waste.
Here's the range.
That is a BEAUTIFUL range Winnie! Any idea of how old it is?
I have a fireplace with a very large box and a large outdoor grill that I'd probably convert to wood for three season cooking then use the fireplace on bad days. I also have 25 gallons of gasoline stored (with stabilizer) that can be used in Coleman stoves along with five 20lb propane tanks and probably a dozen small Coleman tanks and map tanks.
For hygiene, an outdoor toilet WITH DOOR would be pretty easy to install.
It is pretty cute isn't it. I think it's about 1930's.Quote:
Originally Posted by nell67
I need to do some more research on it and get it safety tested. I haven't had much luck finding any info on the make so far on the interweb. Not quite sure where to go from here. It's a Carlyle Hobark. There are so many knobs and dampers it's not just a case of light it and away we go!
well this hasn't really answered my question of "where" would you look for food.
what i see are many relying on community and government.
as far as looting and rioting-possible at first but as energy dies down so will the criminals.
Sure some may make it up here, but then i don't see them dragging kitchens behind them so how to prepare the corn in the feild, how bout that rabbit-most will turn up there noses at it.
as far as wild food, both vegatative and meat, well maybe close to civilization it may be picked over but thats it, the game will go deep into the bush, maybe allot here don't have any large amounts of bush around, some here do and the capabilty to go deep- i mean like 7 days of walking in deep, those will live
Reminds me of a story
when i was married to the first wife she had spoiled her boy on take out food, partly because she was a busy single mom, and partly cuz she was lazy. so about 18 months into our relationship we goes to her moms for dinner, meat and taters type of chow, and what does little eddie do? well he truns of his nose looks at his mom and says" i want some real food"
and that my feinds sums up the world today- they won't want to eat weeds and porkypines, even when starving. ok by me, means more for me
let me say this, so as not to be a hypocryte.
i can be just as lazy as the next guy, in my very busy life it is easier to pop a frozen something in the microwave or stop by the firechiefs fish and chip stand or eat at the cafateria at work, but what i find most important to do is stay in shape and have adequate stores put away, what helps also is that at this point i have a 3 yr jumpstart on my wild edibles quest and that i moved far enough north that i can hunt and trap along with the other locals who know the area, now do i think i am alone in that? heck no but i think that if the hordes of folks that want to come to the bush because we have lakes and farms, they will not be dragging the proper supplies to sustain themselves and will be of no threat in the bush for overharvesting.
also even if the big city folks come this far north looking for food its a long walk400km from toronto to here, sure some will make it. also as rick says most of us in this small community will band together to help each other, will that happen in the large metro? i'm not hopeful of that
one other point on wildedibles
i have been out on walks with my sar group and pointing out WE's and it always strikes me as funny when i point out something, lets use sweet fern as it just happened this weekend, so anyways one young lady takes some and tries to eat it and spits it out. First off she wasn't paying attn when i said it makes a palatable tea, but that is the problem is folks think these foods are like clery or apples or carrots, just eat as you go, sure some are but for the most part there is an art to preparing these dishes to make them taste good, thats where learning to cook is important not just to id and harvest, so i think most will try a dandelion or cat tail as they are easy to id and spit them out with disgust and walk away from life saving and sustaining food
Yes, I store enough propane to run a camp stove for two years. I also plan on taking advantage of living in the Sunshine State (solar oven and cooker).Quote:
Originally Posted by rwc1969
I do not live in a high rise. My house has a septic tank. Toilet is easily flushed with a bucked of rain water.
I seriously do not envision any SHTF scenarios where there will be a total collapse of everything, everywhere.........but nothing is impossible.
well i wonder how many who have ever been in a shtf scenario ever thought it would happen to them
Very true. That's why we all prepare as best we can for what is most probable.Quote:
Originally Posted by wareagle69
can't argue with that logic
what else ya got?
Has anybody lived through a real long term SHTF scenario. I've been through hurricanes. But, honestly a week or two with out power is far from a SHTF. Even folks who had everything taken from them had folks that would help.
I have always had good times and bad. Sometimes the good times are a result of what initially looked like a bad thing.
I was fighting a decent size gator that had just dug in and a thunder storm hit us hard. We are in a metal boat and I finally pushed the issue and the gator got away cause the hook straightened. We are riding back in this freezing rain with thunder in lightning reminding us very frequently that we are in a metal boat in the middle of gosh darned no where. LOL
I said golly gee this is BS! My buddy says, "You know what they do when its raining like this in Russia?"
I said, "No, what?"
He says, "They let it rain. That's all they can do."
When the storm your preparing for comes. You may or may not be prepared for what it brings. But, each of us will live our lives. The other option sucks.
As an instructor, the first thing I teach my students is "I wish it wasn't like this" . I then tell them, now that you've gotten that out of the way, let's get down to the business of survival.Quote:
Originally Posted by wareagle69
Iwould say that the important part of this scenario is the preperation. Check out what game is available, what wild edibles are around and where you can get water.
For me, I am butted up to the Oakland hills, so there are deer and other game. Many of the weeds that people are always wacking down are edible and I have enough land to grow a fairly large garden as do the neighbors on either side of me. Heck I was up at the range and the deer and turkeys were comming down on the range as we were shooting. As for water, I have storage barrels and a rain catchment system. If need be there is a college campus just up the street and they have a pool, large green house and other amenities for a nice survival retreat (except that they are right next to a freeway and still in an urban enviroment). Once the population is trimmed down the campus would make a good place to settle for about 100 or so people.
I think the urban environment offers a lot that most folks overlook. Once you get away from the obvious stuff like stores and warehouses there are an unbelievable number of places you can acquire both food and water. Just sit down and start making a list of all the places you can think of. Restaurants, cafeterias, vending machine companies, trucking companies, railroad yards, homes of those that bug out, hospitals, nursing homes, salvation army, food pantries, and on and on. Those are just some quick examples. While everyone is arm wrestling over the last Hershey bar at their neighborhood Safeway, you can be packing your car with cases of food from the semi left parked down the street. Improvise and adapt is the message.
lol, reminds me of my teenage semi-homeless days. the donut shop hangout always provided food, in the way of free donut holes. the staff said they weren't allowed to give us any food, but ,hint hint, when they threw it away in the dumpster at the end of the night, well.... so we opened the trash bags full of donuts and trash, and took the sealed, unopened, still fresh-but-unsellable-by-law, bags of donut holes. like i said, lol!
They call it prepping don't they?
That means that one does not wait until the last minute for anything. That year of food (don't tell me you only have the BOB!) gives you one year to prepare for the second year. If you wait until you are out of food and start roaming around you blew it.
If you do not know how to dehydrate food without power now is the time to learn. If you do not know how to wrangle a heard of goats, trap rats or skin and cook a dog now is the time to learn. If you have not figured out how to cook in severe situations now is the time to learn.
What will they do in the cities? Check out some history. We have modern precident. The Battle of Linengrad, Stalingrad, Hurricane Katrina. In the 1880s Memphis was quarinteened for Yellow Fever, sorrounded by troops with orders to shoot anyone leaving. Everyone will be ordered to leave or ordered to stay.
When Huricane Ike hit Cincinnati the power was out for 5 days. Even though the temperature was mild people were on the verge of panic as the ice supplies ran out and the beer trucks could not deliver. They never thought about the water supply. The entire city was 12 hours away from being out of water when the pumping stations regained power. 1,000,000 have a 5 day water supply, then the riots start. Then the disease starts. Within 2 weeks 25% will be dead. Within 2 months 30-50%.
Did they learn? NO! This is the same bunch that whines and expects the city to supply them with firewood when the show storms knock out the power every year.
We are the preparers. No matter what anyone thinks of us and our ideas. We are simply doing now what everyone that went through the Great Depression and survived did. The reminants of that generation do not belittle us.
Now wait a minute. Don't anyone go off whacking dogs just to get in practice. And don't be herdin' anyone else's goats either. You gotta be careful, Rat. Some of these yoyo's already had their guns out. Didn't you 2D?
I live on the Ottawa river. Across the river is Quebec, where there are no homes for... well util you go over the top and come back down at Russia. Lots of bush and Algonquin park to the south.
While there would be a lot of people hunting the land, I don't think there would be a lot willing to go the distance and hunt for a couple days. There are a lot of road hunters these days that are too lazy to get off their ATV. Overweight out of shape hunters with no ATV equals less competition. Also, I don't think a lot would hunt across the river. If they did, there is lots of land.
I'm not a Davy Crockett but I do hunt (walking, not on an ATV), fish and look for wild eatables. If push came to shove I wouldn't think twice of eating bugs and worms to keep me going while I hunted (but I do prefer apples and granola bars as a snack).
As far as the food lines and been seen out. I am 6" 192 lbs which is an ok weight but I would intensionally drop 10-15 lbs so I looked thiner in order not to raise suspicion about my food reserves and harvested food.
Probably wouldn't look good if I was putting on weight... while everyone was loosing.
Having said all this I really need to get my reserves built up more... a lot more
The flip side of that is if you look healthy folks might be afraid to tackle you since they are on the puny side.
I did not intend anyone to start boiling water to poach the neighbors poodle. I am simply a historian that has studied many things other people have little interest in. I also remember things others seem to have forgotten.
Due to the records kept by physicians during the Warsaw Rising during WW2 and the receint medical work done combating and treating anorexia, we have a great store of information about just how long one can stay alive on minimal caloric intake.
More people will be killed doing stupid things to get food than will die from actual starvation. That includes wasting more energy to obtain the food than the food provides.
Think about it from a "weight loss program" attitude. How hard is it to lose weight on purpose? How long would it take us to reach "ideal weight"? If I had to drop down to 1000 calories a day it would take me 6 months to "lose down to what I never should have been up to", as long as I was sitting around doing nothing.
This is one positive aspect of bugging in. If you have a "months worth" of food at 3,000 calories a day, and strech it out to three months at 1,000 you will probably not be more than 10 pounds underweight if you started at normal. If you are running around like a wild man carrying a 50 pound BOB and trying to scrounge food you will be dead from starvation in a month. Or probably killed by some farmer protecting his chickenhouse. SHTF you are stealing food and food means life. Protecting the food is protecting your life.
Anyone seen my dog?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick
I Figure to eat as well as possible, and if I get any Bull'snot, I'll say, "I am sorry you don't know how to subsist, what you got to trade, maybe I could teach you".
Just leave a few skeletal remains strewn aroung the property - it'll do two things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sourdough
1) People won't question why you are putting on weight.
2) People won't bother you.
I curious have anybody seeded or developed wild foods?
the reason I ask is within a couple miles of me there are a few backwaters and I have thought about seeding some wild rice. not sure how this would work out but if I could get it going it would be a good source of food. I should drag a canoe back to some of those places and may find out there is wild rice there after all.
You keep coming back to cities being full of food, restaurants, schools, business cafeterias...
Assuming you can get past the roaming gangs, most of that stuff will be spoiled by the time you would be able to get to it. It's a really sad fact that a lot of restaurants re-heat prepared food. Most of the chain restaurants and most of the schools re-heat packaged pre-prepared food that comes in from a supplier. The power goes, all that becomes so much garbage. Gone are the days where things are made from scratch, except maybe the high-end restaurants.
I once worked in a 24 hour grocery store as an overnight baker while in college. There was a threat of a bad snowstorm and I had one gentleman come in behind the counter and demand I sell him eggs from the bakeshop fridge. All of the eggs were gone out on the shelves and he wanted those bakeshop eggs and he knew they were in there. Goddam glad security was on the ball and took him away. But there are no eggs. All that bakeshop stuff is either frozen dough or par-baked and frozen. All we did was proof it and bake it, or thaw it and finish it. No scratch ingredients.
I cannot even begin to fathom why New Englanders go out and buy Milk, Eggs, and Bread in preparation for a snowstorm. What do they do, make French toast?
Anyway, as far as preps, you aren't likely to run out of food in 2 years. But if the government says 2 years they mean at least 4. Plan beyond what they are telling you.
Grym brings up a point I had missed. I do a lot of canning. I have a backstash of lids and have been trying to figure out how to afford some of those European canning jars that have the old-style reusable rubber gaskets. @#$@-ing expensive! But, unless I learn how to make vinegar and/or have a huge sugar source, I darn well better invest in a pressure canner and figure out an outdoor kitchen that'll burn hot for the amount of time you need for pressure-canning. You can't boiling-water-bath-can non-acidic stuff like meats and most vegetables. I do have a book on making vinegar. Haven't tried it yet. And Honey works for sugar, if you can get it.
It all depends on where you live whether folks are going to band together and help each other, or eat you for dinner. When we were without power here for 12 days during an ice storm (the authorities kept telling us it would be 4 or 5 days, then always 'maybe tomorrow' for 12 days), there were reports up and down the valley that generators were being stolen. The thieves would listen for them then wait for the people to go to work (?!) or leave to get supplies and just walk off with them. People were stealing gas, as no stations had power to run the pumps and no backup generators (!?!). People were stealing firewood... And this is rural. I have no doubt that people would come with guns looking to steal food if it came to down to it.
I have a lake for fish. It would be fished out quickly if people stayed. There are several wildlife preserves around but there are also a lot more people with guns out here than in the nanny-state cities. And more apt to protect their hunting grounds with them.
Squirrels. Chipmunks. Rabbits. Even the pretty birds at the birdfeeder are all fair game. Wild edibles, a little more difficult. The patches I've developed of wild edibles in the yard aren't nearly big enough yet to sustain any length of time. Most of where I live is overgrown hardwood forest. Not a lot of understory. Lots of acorns. Every other year. Best bet is walking the power lines for berries and such and avoid the roads.
I'd go down swinging, that's for sure.
maybe I miss read this , but wouldnt this be concidered looting?Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick
[QUOTE=kyratshooter;234804]I did not intend anyone to start boiling water to poach the neighbors poodle. [QUOTE]
My neighbors yapping little retarded bark at dirt crossedeyed crap on my porch steps chihuahua is the first to go if I run out of food, as a matter of fact it may be first to go in the stew pot so I dont run out of food.